Six Community Gardens Win Pennsylvania
Horticultural Society Awards

WPC has a 30-year history of partnering with local groups and individuals to plant gardens
and green spaces ranging from Erie to the West Virginia border and from Mercer to Harrisburg. In 2008, more than 6,000 volunteers found time to dig, plant, mulch and weed in a collective effort to improve their communities. The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society
honored six of these gardens with its prestigious 2008 Community Greening Award this past fall.

Each garden has a story to tell – a story of committed volunteers and a community that experiences benefits in ways that extend far beyond creating beautiful gardens. Here, we offer two stories from our list of awardwinning gardens.

The McKnight Road Community Garden

Chris Johnson has been stewarding the McKnight Road garden since its inception 13 years ago. As a member of the Environmental Committee of the Berkeley Hills Civic Association, she accompanied WPC staff members as they scouted for a location to plant a garden.

“We drove around the North Hills and came upon this island that was surrounded by traffic near McIntyre Square,” Johnson said. “It seemed like a great place to have a little oasis of flowers in the midst of gridlock. Then we found out it had a water source underneath it,
which made it even more perfect.”

Today, the McKnight Road garden is a beloved feature of this busy commercial zone.
Once the garden has been planted, Johnson stops by two or three times a week to water, weed and check on the garden. She credits her “core volunteers” for the success of the garden, including the “Green Team,” a group of seventh grade students from North Hills Junior High School that boasts more than 110 volunteers.

Seventh-grade Teacher Heather Cobbey and four other teachers coordinate the Green Team project, which has supported the McKnight Road garden for 11 years.

“All five of us get in there and dig with the kids,” said Cobbey. “And it’s great to see the kids get a genuine feeling of accomplishment. Whenever the garden starts to bloom, a student will proudly point to an area and say,‘That’s the section I planted.’”

For many students, this marks the first time anyone has suggested they garden and the idea is at times met with apprehension.

“There’s a student from a few years back that really didn’t want to garden,” Cobbey said. “He went with us to the first pull-out in the fall and he really got into it. He told me later that it was actually pretty cool and he was looking forward to the spring planting.”

The Pittsburgh Project Community Garden

The Pittsburgh Project is a community development organization that reaches out to neighbors, in part through gardening. The nonprofit organization on the city’s North Side exists to improve the way of life of its neighbors, young and old alike.

“We’re working to clean up our part of the city, and WPC’s community garden is a very important part of this process,” said Pittsburgh Project Community Garden Coordinator Courtney Williams. “The kids are spending a lot of time in the garden this year. They see
the results and know that they had a hand in making all of that happen.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In addition to planting the community garden, the group recently acquired six vacant lots across the street from their headquarters and expanded their efforts by planting an extensive vegetable garden on the site with the help of neighborhood young people. All of the food grown here will be made available to the community. The group may start a farmers’ market in the coming season. It’s become a fall tradition to remove annuals from WPC’s gardens in order to keep the soil healthy for the next planting season. These annuals have proven to be a good source of mulch for the Pittsburgh Project’s vegetable garden. Last fall, WPC’s Landscaping Services Coordinator Angela Masters began taking the pulled flowers and weeds fromother community gardens and delivering them to the vegetable garden site.

“It may sound unusual,” Courtney said, “but we’re always glad to see Angela bringing another truckload of dead flowers and weeds our way.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Winter 2008 Conserve  |  Western Pennsylvania Conservancy  |  Fallingwater